Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Losing the war against the planet

Posted by
Ugo Bardi

We knew we had picked up a fight we couldn't win when we tackled a whole planet, but perhaps we didn't expect that the planet would fight back so viciously and so effectively. 2011 has been a year of environmental disasters in numbers and intensity never seen before. And we ain't seen nothing yet!

There is a general agreement that global warming will increase the strength of hurricanes; this is, of course, very uncertain and you may be right that in the long run (centuries) the trend will reverse. But one thing that is certain is that we have increased the negative effects of hurricanes and tropical cyclones by urbanization, deforestation, and other modification.

Ugo, the oddest thing I find is that scientists overlook the opportunity to point out the simple conclusions one can reach by thinking scientifically. It's wrong to accept the layman's questions that are unanswerable then, other than to help them understand the questions science can answer with high confidence.

For a system driven by a thermal gradient, increasing the gradient generally intensifies the whole system. Here we have convection, driven by the temperature difference between earth and space. Surface temperature has been going up and of the outer atmosphere going down...

So, unless you can show why some local convection is excluded from interacting with the whole system, you'd assume all atmospheric convection is affected, right? Therefore one's first assumption would be that **every air current on earth** would be relatively more intense than otherwise, given the need for the whole system to carry more energy. Isn't that right?

Well, it is a difficult question. My understanding has always been that as the planet warms up, the temperature gradient between the polar regions and the equatorial ones is reduced. With reduced gradients, strong perturbations, hurricanes and the like, should go down. But, I think, that will be for the future. For now, pumping energy into the system means that the system dissipates it in various ways, including hurricanes.

Who

Ugo Bardi is a member of the Club of Rome and the author of "Extracted: how the quest for mineral resources is plundering the Planet" (Chelsea Green 2014)

Ugo Bardi's blog

The depletion of the cheap ores that we have been extracting up to now is at the root of our economic problems.

Extracted

A report to the Club of Rome published by Chelsea Green. (click on image for a link)

Solarino

Cassandra

This blog was known as "Cassandra's Legacy" up to March 2014. It has changed name, but not its ideas. And don't forget that Cassandra's prophecies always turned out to be right!

About the author

Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy. He is interested in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. Contact: ugo.bardi(littlewhirlything)unifi.it.